


these days i tend to lie

by lethalogica



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Diamonds and Toads fusion, M/M, faerie tale inspired, gardener!Derek, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 12:24:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2025042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethalogica/pseuds/lethalogica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He lays in a bed of gemstones at night. His tears are drops of sapphire, flowing off his face to become a part of the riches underneath him when he sobs.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>He wishes it would stop. He doesn't want this, didn't want this. It‘s like being trapped in a faerie tale. In fact, he remembers that when he was smaller, his mother read a story to him in the library, about a young woman who had these exact same problems, except that she found her true love not long after her predicament started.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>He hasn't, and he’s so desperately afraid he never will.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	these days i tend to lie

He lays in a bed of gemstones at night. His tears are drops of sapphire, flowing off his face to become a part of the riches underneath him when he sobs.

He leaves a trail of opals when he is outside. His sorrow makes the stones appear last from where his feet stepped, so he never steps backwards.

He bleeds rubies of all shapes and sizes. His paper cuts leave tiny shards of blood red pebbles on the books, shining under the light.

The spectators follow him like flies to a corpse if ever he goes outside of the fence. He _feels_ like a corpse, sometimes.

He wishes it would stop. He doesn’t want this, didn’t want this. It‘s like being trapped in a faerie tale. In fact, he remembers that when he was smaller, his mother read a story to him in the library, about a young woman who had these exact same problems, except that she found her true love not long after her predicament started.

He hasn’t, and he’s so desperately afraid he never will.

*

It’s not without the benefits because they _have_ helped, the gemstones. His family no longer lives in squalor. Instead, they live in a heavily secured estate. They completely relocated from the city to an expanse near the coast once they'd sold a large enough amount of the stones.

He’s traded the freedom of the streets for imprisonment within a mansion. He knows the sentiment is unfair and selfish when he confronts the resentment stirring in his lungs with every breath and stone that materializes, but he’s not his sickly little sister, who needs the doctors the gemstones allow his family to finally afford.

So he perseveres.

*

The suitors come in dozens for brunch every Saturday, waiting in a line that starts from the black steel gates surrounding the mansion. He meets with them one at a time, never the same one twice, and allows himself to be charmed over coffee and cookies.

He pours amethyst from his hands when he laughs and tiny flakes of pure gold when he smiles. His meetings have never lasted for more than half an hour, because when he leaves to give himself a pep talk in the bathroom, if he comes back to notice just a bit of the pile that’s accumulated on the table missing, he dismisses the suitor. If the heap remains untouched, he invites them again for dinner the following day.

He’s never had dinner with one of them.

*

When he sits down by himself in his bedroom, though, he loathes himself. Loathes how he enjoys the attention because he never had any before, when he was barely surviving winter in the streets, huddled together with his family as the snow drifted upon the sidewalk from the downcast skies. He loves to be loved, even though he’s aware none of the people who come to court him exactly want his love.

When he’s not giving himself grief, he wonders why. Why was he the one this – _curse_ – chose. Why not his oldest sister, who can command the air of the room she’s in easily with a sharp tongue and loaded words, or his brother only a year younger, who has the puppy eyes and endearingly uneven jaw to coax the curly-haired boy at the bodega near the shelter into sparing some nearly rotten fruits and vegetables before his father came back.

Why him, with the dull brown eyes and buzz cut. Him, with the moles dancing unappealingly in splatters all over his body, and the uneven pale and tan of him skin from being exposed unwilling to the sun during summer, then into the alleys behind dumpsters when winter rushed upon the city.

But all the pondering never leads to any answers.

*

The garden is his favourite part of the estate. No-one can bother him there, not his father giving him those pitying glances, not his sisters giving him worried looks with gratitude bubbling beneath, not his brother with his sympathetic, tight smiles.

The garden is where his family allows him free range, where he lays his back on the grass and relaxes, inhaling the clean air as he watches the sky turn from a dusky red to bright blue to heavy purple. It is where he strolls through the grounds while the breeze from the nearby ocean brushes by, and where he reads novels leisurely and rests under the shade before the natural light ceases. There are a variety of native flowers and trees surrounding him at all times, the heady floral aroma becoming a part of his own scent when he starts to spend nearly all of his time between the blossoms and saplings.

When it comes to the second summer in which he sheds the stones there is a new gardener, because the last one had been caught pilfering gemstones while he was taking a nap against a great oak. The new gardener is tending to a temple tree with careful hands as to not crush the flowers.

He comes closer in curiosity and, upon seeing the look of utter calm and enjoyment on the gardener’s face, smiles. He reaches up to snap a plumeria off of a low hanging branch and secures it over his right ear, and the gardener spins around to face him, his dirtied overalls rustling with him. The gardener eyes the flecks of gold now littering the freshly cut grass and glowers at him. The gardener cups his gloved hands to catch the gold and tries to shoves all that he can into the pockets of the young man’s slacks, muttering about not being his maid, and that other gardeners do not have to deal with suddenly appearing _boys_ making a mess of their work.

Amethyst starts to falls furiously from his hands along with the gold and the gardener curses.

*

There is a spring ceremony the next year, in front of the same tree, where the ring slipped over his finger has the last stone he ever produced as the centrepiece, the diamond from their first kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in a program called Writegirl, and I meet with my mentor once a week to write. She brought The 4am Breakthrough this week and we chose a prompt that told us to write a story about someone who loves to be loved.
> 
> Inspired by the faerie tale known as Diamonds and Toads, and the title is from Amsterdam by Imagine Dragons.
> 
> If unclear, Stiles is the subject of the story, Derek is the new gardener, Scott is the little brother, Erica is the little sister, Lydia is the older sister, Sheriff Stilinski is the father, Mama Stilinski is the mother, and Isaac is the boy at the bodega.
> 
> According to Wikipedia,
>
>> In modern Polynesian culture, [a plumeria] can be worn by women to indicate their relationship status - over the right ear if seeking a relationship, and over the left if taken.


End file.
